I married a photographer! I didn’t know that at the time - not that it would have made any difference in my decision to marry this amazing man who had entered my life and captured my heart. But not very hidden in Lew’s highly creative brain was a powerful capacity to capture the moment and bring it to life! And so I became a co-worker in that wonderful process of preserving family memories in photo albums for each member of the family.
Fast forward to grown children and the beginning of new families and grandchildren and more photo albums. Multiple occasions became opportunities to remember our lives on film. The photo albums grew to include graduations; weddings; new births and deaths: A litany of our family in motion captured in a small camera or more recently through the amazing discovery that we could take pictures with our telephones!
By this time I had filled eighty-seven large photo albums with the recorded history of our family. They occupied nearly an entire bookcase in the living room - a beautiful reminder of the reality of this family and our lives together. They became an amazing resource of names and dates, trips and marriages and all the moments that held us together as “our family”.
But after Lew died, it was time to move from our home of forty two years into a facility for seniors and a two room apartment which could never contain all the contents of our home. My eighty-seven photo albums were made ready to be shipped to individual members of the family in a kind of “graduation” ritual to honor the passage of time and the realities of the family.
At the same time these heart-filled albums were being shipped to their new destinations, the market for photo albums of the family shifted to photos taken with our phones and new ways to store pictures. The intimacy of this recorded history was replaced by the new mechanics of photography without the artistry of a hand-held camera.
But memory does not forget. Indelible moments remain housed in the heart to remind us of earlier days. The accuracy of each moment is no longer critical. We begin to rely on the feelings stirred by memory, without needing a moment by moment recital of events.
The “Gallery of my Heart” is an open door to the past and to the present. Its artistry is
manifest in the pictures of people and events that memory provides us. Emotions bring colors and connections to the heart to raise its consciousness. Grief brings shadows and darkness. Joy is bathed in light and love suggests the brilliance of blues and greens.
My heart’s gallery is a record of life’s surprises and joys as well as life’s darker moments. It opens its doors to remembering which always touches heart and spirit. And when our spirit is touched, we discover God in the memories: God in the triumphs and the tragedies; God as the constants of life intermingle with the blurred moments of memory.
In my new home, as a resident in a multi-age care facility, I do not have a camera.
I have kept a few of the photo albums for remembering. But my “Heart’s Gallery” is now living in present time. Day by day, my comfort zone increases as I learn this new map of my life. Bound together in a process that none of us have ever experienced before, new friends open doors to our shared experiences of aging.
The future is more elusive than ever; the past is growing more quiet. But the Gallery of My Heart looks for God in every moment.
